L.M. Sacacas, Render Unto the Machine:

My present thesis is something like this: The claim or fear that AI will displace human beings becomes plausible to the degree that we have already been complicit in a deep deskilling that has unfolded over the last few generations. Or, to put it another way, it is easier to imagine that we are replaceable when we have already outsourced many of our core human competencies.

Put somewhat differently, the message of the medium we are presently calling AI is the realization that modern institutions and technologies have been schooling people toward their own future obsolescence.

Indeed, we might go further and say that the triumph of modern institutions is that they have schooled us even to desire our own obsolescence. If a job, a task, a role, or an activity becomes so thoroughly mechanical or bureaucratic, for the sake of efficiency and scale, say, that it is stripped of all human initiative, thought, judgment, and, consequently, responsibility, then of course, of course we will welcome and celebrate its automation. If we have been schooled to think that we lack basic levels of latent competence and capability, or that the cultivation of such competencies and capabilities entails too much inconvenience or risk or uncertainty, then of course, of course we will welcome and celebrate the displacement of our labor, involvement, and care.

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Ross Douthat’s columns often have some thoughtful insights but, more often than not, also incorporate some fundamental misunderstanding of human nature which void his conclusions.  Not here, No Culture for Alienated Men:

There is a lot of talk lately about a crisis of manhood, manifest in statistics showing young men falling behind young women in various indicators of education and ambition, answered from the left by therapeutic attempts to detoxify masculinity and from the right by promises of masculine revival. The root of the problem seems clear enough, even if the solutions are contested: The things that men are most adapted for (or socialized for, if you prefer that narrative, though the biological element seems inescapable) are valued less, sometimes much less, in the peacetime of a postindustrial civilization than in most of the human past.

In a phrase, when we talk about traditional modes of manhood, we’re often talking about mastery through physical strength and the capacity for violence. That kind of mastery will always have some value, but it had more value in 1370 than in 1870 and more in 1870 than it does today. And the excess, the superfluity, must therefore be repressed, tamed or somehow educated away.

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Ted Gioia, The Final Triumph of Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023):

Given the overall tone of society, we need brutal books that shake us up—but those are precisely the ones that publishers don’t want us to read.

We’re living in a paradoxical time. People and events are pushing us to the brink—and in the most ugly ways imaginable. But at the very same time, a pervasive daintiness and primness has taken over the world of books. It’s gotten so bad, that many books for kids are also marketed to grown-ups and vice versa—perhaps the lasting legacy of Harry Potter.

Sometimes I can’t even tell the difference. I start reading an award-winning new book, and ask myself: Is this targeted at me, or an early teen? Welcome to the Namby Pamby Era in fiction.

Just a few days ago, a novelist withdrew her book from publication—because it was set in Russia in the 1930s. This might hurt feelings (of Ukrainians, etc.). So the book got axed. For better or worse, that’s the literary culture in the year 2023. At this rate, we’ll soon have a new ending for War and Peace, with Napoleon returning from Moscow in triumph. Anything else would be indelicate.

This is why the culture wasn’t ready for Cormac McCarthy’s last works. And it’s also why we need them all the more.

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